B. Joseph Pine II & James Gilmore: The Experience EconomyThis is a groundbreaker, folks. One that you should be reading right now. Go. Shoo. Go get it now. It is affecting you as you read this, whether or not you know that. Seminal work on what has been a transition to a new type of economy. (*****)

Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Rick Levine: The Cluetrain ManifestoIf this book didn't spend so much time proclaiming its manifesto and explained it a little more, it would be a disruptive innovation unto itself. It is a powerful and often metaphorically lovely book about the new customer a few years before that customer even knew it was what the cluetrain crew train said it was. A great book but strident as hell. This was a more important book than many realize it was. Or is. (****)

Naras Eechambadi: High Performance MarketingIf marketing is something you do, then this book is something you read. Not only does this dynamic book look at marketing in a contemporary fashion - with the customer at the center - but it also helps you figure out how to (finally!) measure your activities and results. A genuinely refreshing brace of business thinking in a field that needs it. (*****)

Shoshana Zuboff: The Support EconomyThis is a revolutionary book. I love this book (partially because it validates everything I say :-)) because it recognizes that the "enterprise logic" of managerial capitalism is no longer sufficient to interest a consumer who is trying to control his/her own value. There's so much more.... (*****)

James G. Barnes: Secrets of Customer Relationship Management: Its How You Make Them FeelThis is a you gotta read, read. Jim is a board member of CRMGuru, has won numerous academic honors, is a real world CRM consultant, runs marathons, and can write up a storm. He thinks out of the box and then provides approaches to how you can. This book is undegoing updating but is well worth it as is. Get it. Now. What are you waiting for? Hurry up!! (*****)

Jill Dyche: The CRM HandbookThe ultimate guide to implementation of CRM. This book is about as practical as it gets. Just lays it right out and boom, you should have an idea of what you have to consider when it comes to CRM. (*****)

Donna Fluss: The Real-Time Contact CenterAs Donna points out, this is an ironic title. All contact centers are already "real-time." None the less this is both cutting edge and definitive and reading it is a must (*****)

February 21, 2008

Loyalty Lab Converses With the Customer - Software-wise, That Is....

I read this dispatch (a lovely word for article in this case that conjures up romantic kind of war correspondent images - though in a cinematic way, not a real world way. I hate reality shows....), a couple of days ago on something that I find, at least on the surface, highly intriguing.

Loyalty Lab, a company I know next to nothing about, released version 3.0 of its integrated marketing platform which they call "Ready-Aim-Engage;" (Cute, but not that creative) While releases of software or platforms or services are hardly anything earth shattering - in fact, hardly anything glass shattering - this one caught my eye, because of what the platform purports to do. Here it is in short order.

Marketers can track responses wherever customers purchase or interact, providing what the company calls "a more accurate view of response rates and performance.

The standalone email marketing product provides data integration with "Ready-Aim-Engage." Theoretically, (since I haven't seen it in action at all) it enables marketers to link email to transactional (of course) and non-transactional behaviors -- so messaging can be relevant to social networks.

Up to this point, interesting for its non-transactional promise, but not REAL interesting.

Why, you might ask in a puzzled way, with your brow furrowed and your finger (depends on which one) up in the air - all the while thinking that Paul is nuts.

The former features are ways of integrating traditional tools like customer segmentation, the operational kind of CRM and a non-traditional tool or two - like actions on non-transactional behaviors - to a traditional channel - email in particular. Nice, but not dramatically different than a number of things out there.

BUT

The latter recording, interacting, reading and referring tools is the approach a platform that truly believes that, as The Cluetrain Manifesto says, "marketing is a conversation" Which makes it completely NOT like all the marketing apps tied to CRM suites or best-of-breed approaches - the ones that I railed against in this entry....and this one.

First, this is actually allowing a company to create an actual dialogue with its customers and informing the company as to when the dialogue advances. That is BEYOND merely important - that is mission-critical to interacting with customers who control the business ecosystem.

The second side bears a little more explanation.

In her white paper of last April, "Social Technographics", Forrester Group social computing whiz Charlene Li, found that companies 1. don't know how their customers use social technologies and 2. are inexperienced with what works, when it works and where it works. Plus (not from the paper) its hard to measure and, because much of the behaviors generated are emotional (a.k.a. non-transactional in this case), the value is hard to understand. What makes the R-A-E 3.0 important is that it gives the enterprise social mavens the ability to capture interactions that involve the social media - blogs, social networks and so on. This is not something that has been easily available - especially in a framework. It seems that part of the technology solution is that they have pre-built bridges to social networks like Facebook and APIs to customize the connections between the social networks and the enterprise or to build internal social network applications. Plus, apparently they provide social network analysis tools judging from this line in their promotional stuff:

"Discover which customers are influencing the rest of your database."

AND all of this is on demand.

While trolling around the website, I found that they had a modestly interesting and certainly informally (entertainingly) written blog called Loyalty Dogs that basically covers topical areas like customer experience, loyalty (duh!), program analytics, technology trends and "interesting stuff." Additionally, they have a Loyalty Lab Library which is a compendium of recent articles that are drawn from the industry standard sources (such as they are) sources like DestinationCRM and 1to1 magazine again on topical subjects. What is GLARINGLY missing in their library is the blog resources that can add a LOT to their library or wiki resources or podcast links or....you get the message. But that is a small (big) niggling (painful) omission.

This is something worth looking into further. I'm not sure how well executed it is. I've never seen it in a production environment so I don't know if R-A-E 3.0 even works. But I have to say that Loyalty Lab at least seems to be not just paying attention to the customer that is now running the ecosystem; but also trying to capture what that customer is doing. And that is attention-getting.

Comments

David, you're absolutely right for the most part. Those issues aren't something that this software created though or even something that the software exacerbates. Those are issues endemic to the entire social media, network, software spectrum because it is a new field and the proper balance between privacy and conversation is still out to jury. For example, there are pharma companies that own facilitated user communities that are based around a specific medical condition or treatment that are run by a third party so the pharma company can monitor the traffic without its influence being apparent. I find that appalling because its deceitful. If Loyalty Lab doesn't have some way of letting the participants know they are being monitored or their data is being captured, I would be somewhat concerned. I don't know if they do. But on the other hand, a participant in a social network or user community has a REASONABLE expectation of privacy but the very fact they are participating in a public or private but social forum should indicate reasonably that someone somewhere is going to be monitoring or capturing the conversation, most likely. Naivete is not an adult excuse. However, that said, REASONABLE expectations means that things like Facebook's Beacon fiasco should NEVER happen.

The privacy / customer choice issues that are raised by this - without looking at the specifics, granted - are disconcerting at best, and potentially downright scary. This reads, to me, as "the customer can no longer keep private the conversations they have with other customers - we will know."

Granted, it is important to be able to resolve issues that customers see as negative (and prevent their spread) and repeat good experiences (and promote their spread), but this seems to be forcing traditional CRM constraints upon the new environment - CRM 2.0? - where the customer is in charge.